Week 10: Online Social Networks

I was interested to read the articles this week that had to do with the academic environment and social software. I'm interested in it for a number of reasons, particularly, because online communities are so ubiquitous and increasingly popular and I'm interested in how the academic environment is responding to this.

There were two articles this week that touched on the topic. Although Hewitt and Forte and Williams discuss student/faculty relationships, their findings, attitudes and messages are quite different.

Hewitt and Forte examine the issue as a research study and use various methods to find out what the implications are for students and faculty on facebook. The authors determine that basically there aren't any positive or negative effects, but their study continues.

The focus of Matthew Williams' essay covers the same topic, but from a different viewpoint. He decides that it is a professor's job to make lectures more interesting and entertaining, that is why students are currently using IM, or facebook during classes. He suggests that academic classes become more collaborative, but I don't think that "inviting students to the inner workings of our classes so that they may be an integral and active part of the learning process" is realistic or necessarily the answer. Clearly this might work in a graduate level setting, but a first-year undergraduate course with hundreds of students is not the place for this kind of collaboration. I think Williams is too idealistic and makes the issue black and white - basically he says that professors are boring and out of touch, and students have every right to entertain themselves in class.

Hewitt and Forte say that faculty are getting on facebook to connect with students and to try to relate to them. This contradicts Williams' p.o.v. that professor/student relationships are built on "arrogance, pretentiousness, and elitism".

I'm left with some questions - what is actually happening today in university classrooms in regards to social software? Is it seen as a hindrance, a benefit or just altogether ignored by faculty? Can social networking exist for the greater good in universities?

I think that part the answer starts in the library. Hopefully academic librarians will help build bridges between faculty and students by highlighting all of the positive features of online social networking.